joeg

I had Funk #1 and Flair #2. As for the 90s, here is my arguement for Funk for that decade. I felt like Funk spent the decade giving back to the business, creating new stars, while Flair spent the decade trying to hold onto the success he had achieved. Both were successful in doing so. But if you look at what Funk achieved in the 90s. How many young guys had the best feud/match of their young careers against Funk in the 90s? A lot of those guys went on to have successful careers thanks to Funk. Funk practically made every single guy in ECW. All of them all a large part of their success to working with Funk. I'll try and list everybody whose career was directly benefited from working with Funk in the 90s- Foley, Dustin Rhodes, Masato Tanaka, Hayabusa, Onita, Raven, Shane Douglas, Sabu, Billy Gunn, Road Dogg, Sandman, Tommy Dreamer, Stevie Richards. That is a lot of very good careers launched or benefited in some way thanks to one guy. What Funk did as a draw in Japan, drawing 40,000 vs Onita, then 35,000 the next year in the Deathmatch Tournament, and 33,000 the next year against Hayabusa and Tanaka rivals what Flair drew while he was the touring champion in the 80s. Flair wasn't selling out baseball stadiums in the 90s but Funk was, and he was doing it in fringe outlaw promotions while making guys like Foley a draw for the next decade. What was Flair drawing in the 90s? Nothing much. Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't the reason the main event for WM8 changed because nobody was showing up to see Flair at the house shows? Also look at the guys in the 90s whose careers were hurt by working with Flair. First that comes to mind would be Scott Steiner and that match you could say Flair intentionally made sure was bad enough to ensure Steiner was never a threat for Flair's spot. Then there was Bret Hart who Flair refused to lose to on TV.

I had a lot of good ones when I was a kid. A bunch of good ECW ones. RVD 4:20, ECW Wrestling on the front with an X Ray of a skull fracture on the back, and Cactus Jack Wanted Dead were probably the best. I am signifigantly heaftier than I was as a teenager however so its not like any of those fit anymore. I would like to know if anybody could point me toward the Buddy Rose "I Worked Hard For This Body" shirt though....

I have no method to watching wrestling other than trying to watch stuff in cronological order. Sometimes I watch single matches, sometimes I watch whole cards or episodes of TV. I rarely watch a single match completely out of context without first watching the lead in matches or angles that set up the match.

I just look at Akiyama and think it would have been so easy to make him (almost) as big of a star as Misawa and Kobashi. 1- Don't drop the title to Ogawa in 4 minutes in his first reign. 2- win his match vs Kobashi at the Dome. That happens NOAH doesn't need to push juniors as heavyweights. The company doesn't fall off of a cliff everytime Kobashi gets hurt and Misawa dies because they have Akiyama to rely on.

Does how poorly Akiyama was booked for his entire career hurt him in something like this? I really can't think of anybody who was a bigger victim of bad booking than Akiyama. Anywhere, ever. The affect of Akiyama's shitty booking limited the number of big matches he had during his peak years, hurt all of Japanese wrestling, and limited how many people saw his matches. Basically what I'm asking is had he been booked strong in the early to mid 2000s and given the chance to run with the ball he deserved would he have finished a top 5 - 10 guy?

I think Akiyama is hurt though because the last 5 years or so he's been putting on amazing performances in struggling promotions that nobody pays attention to anymore. Its the sort of thing where if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it did it really happen sort of thing.

To me John Cazale would be more like a Gino Hernandez or an Art Barr because of the way he died tragically in his prime. I'm going to throw Morgan Freeman out there as the GOAT. I honestly don't think you can find somebody with a more impressive list of credits.

Real or ESPN reporting rumors to stir the pot?

I think once guys like Daniel and Matt stopped posting it just died a slow death. Once before the 80s wrapped it slowly deteriorated. Like the weekly match review thing died. Then best of 1990 died. Then it would be days without a post. Then weeks. Then months. It sort of seems like the same thing is happening over at puroresufan and wko

honestly Lucha Underground has the most potential matches I'm excited to see. They do such a good job building to stuff. How can you not finish an episode in the past 3 weeks and want to see any combination of singles matches involving Pentagon Jr., Mil Muertes, and Matanza. The way Lucha Underground is booking Pentagon Jr. reminds me of how Taz was booked in ECW, where he's just the baddest man on the planet. If you book a guy that way, people percieve him that way.

does anybody have the results from the puroresu.tv before the 80s project? Every 70s Inoki match that made tape was pretty thoroughly examined...

My point is its more than just Benoit for me. I can watch his matches... sometimes, sometimes I can't. There are several wrestlers that because of being horrible people or because of the the shape they are in now, its a struggle to watch some of their matches sometimes. The only way to really watch wrestling is to just not think about it. If you think about whatever, it makes it really hard to watch anything that isn't recent. For example go try and sit through Wrestlemania 6 without disconnecting yourself. Its kind of impossible.

Exactly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRpSoSLOR_A fucking amen

Ditto. I've heard some really, really sleazy stories.

I'm looking at my list. There are multiple felons on it. Flair assulted a stewardess. Lawler married a 15 year old. Barr raped a girl. Austin smacked around his wife. The rumors about guys like Lyger and Patterson are rediculous. Thats not counting all the DUIs and asualts. So I don't see how only Benoit matches can make somebodys stomach turn.

This is pro wrestling. If we were to only vote for pro wrestlers who were good people it would be a quick nomination process and a very short list.

JESUS CHRIST! Fucking awesome, LOL I can't wait to blast through 00s Kobashi! Amazing.So fucking stupid, but AMAZING. Haha cannot wait for you to plow through that. 05 right? was this their exchange in the singles match or their exchange in the tag with Shiozaki and Nakajima?

24 down. Most of them were guys from the golden age, from the 70s, shoot style, midcarders in 90s AJPW, or guys whose careers were very short. I think that with the newer found footage on NWA classics and the WWE Network, if this is done 10 years from now, guys like Ray Stevens, Gino Hernandez, Magnum TA, Pat Patterson, Buddy Rogers, The Sheik, Wahoo, etc will end up placing much better than they did this go around.

The entire BJ Strong Style crew murders each other with their chops, some of them have already been named. Ron Garvin had that nice overhand chop/slap.

What I've been wondering, is did most people go with their 100 favorites ever or the 100 guys they think are the best ever? Or a mix of both....

Piggy backing on the previous posts- while I do believe the finishing run and the bumps to the floor in the those matches were excessive (tiger suplex off the ramp, exploder from the top rope to the floor!!) those matches were the culmination of epic feuds. Misawa vs Kobashi was a title feud so it didn't have as much heat. What it did have was all sorts of call back spots to previous matches. It cemented Kobashi as finally firmly surpassing Misawa, making him the #1 draw in Japan, if not the world, at the time. Kobashi vs Akiyama was a former tag partners turned mortal enemies fued. It was either the first or second NOAH show where Akiyama cracked his then mentor and tag partner Kobashi with a vicious chair shot. This feud had 3 or 4 singles matches, and dozens of tags and 6 mans over the course of 4 years. That match was the culmination of everything Burning vs Sterness. While the crazy, excessive, finishing stretch makes Akiyama look more competive against Kobashi that Misawa, which made him the #2 guy sort of, a win like that at the Tokyo Dome could have potentially brought Akiyama to Kobashi's level. Instead Kobashi dropped the title to Rikio and NOAH has been a dumpster fire ever since.

The over the top epic in AJPW I think really started with the Tiger Driver 91. From there the head drops just got worse and the moves got crazier. The really excessive epic match that comes to mind was the gonza bomb match. I mean fuck Misawa is spiked vertically straight down onto his head, and then kicks out, That I thought was the peak of AJPW excess. In NOAH I thought the peak of excess was Kobashi's title run. At some point in each match he had to take the craziest bump in the history of wrestling. I shudder just thinking about some of them. On the indies I think early 00s was actually really good. Everybody was trying to emulate Battlarts and 90s NJPW juniors, so it wasn't totally excessive. By the late 2000s, nobody who was worth watching 5-10 years earlier was still on the indies. Then indie style became more flippy and over the top as opposed to the hard hitting Battlarts wannabe indie style popularized by Danielson, Ki, Joe, Corino, etc. So it went from the biggest draw on the indies when I started watching indy wrestling being American Dragon vs Low Ki to Kevin Steen and El Generico doing crazy stunts and building forts out of furniture. That was the point I stopped following the indies closely. Now I'd guess the top draw on the indies are super flippy guys who intentionally go for the meta like the Young Bucks or Mike Bailey. I will give the Young Bucks credit for being "good workers" in the old carny sense. If you mean a "good worker" is somebody who is able to milk a "mark" out of as much money is possible, the Young Buck do that better than probably anybody I've ever seen on the indies.

And any momentum Ambrose had will be brought to a screeching hault.

So far for me- Ray Stevens Pat O'Connor Art Barr Magnum TA Verne Yamazaki Hayes Sheik Mascaras Tanaka Yamamoto